…and the never-ending search.

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Lightning strikes again, and all turns yellow…

Once again there’s the feeling of déjà vu… I keep close to 50 saved search thingys on ebay and they say persistence is a fool’s best asset. For a while now this has almost made me show signs of being in the early stages of developing an OCD. I’ll check them when waking up in the middle of the night due to my daughter yelling or crying in my ear, first thing in the morning and then a couple of times during the day when there is nothing else to do. I’m not sure why i do this though. The chances that one morning there will be a The Nation’s Nightmare or something like that with a BIN of $50 are pretty slim. But i do it for the same reason people play the lottery or bet on horses i guess. And i regularly do both of those so… Anyways, now and then something happens that kind of makes it all feel worth while. And this morning was one of those times.

I don’t particularly like the cover to MTV’s High Priority and this is not the first time i’ve mentioned that. And things haven’t changed, it still feels sloppy, unpolished and unfinished to me. So all this considered it was basically at gunpoint that i decided to eventually get a copy. Then i believe it was Kevin Kinney from the WCCC who broke the news that there was also an “alternative” cover with a slight difference in coloring. I then got lucky at the end of 2013 when i found one of those yellow copies at a bargain price on ebay. I didn’t keep that cover for very long though as i sent it to Richard Forrest as a thank you for some nice mock-ups of The Nation’s Nightmare, Night Beat and some other things that he made for me. Time went on and i didn’t give this cover as much as a split second of my thoughts until it appeared again on ebay last summer. This time it was without a BIN and despite my thoughts and feelings about this cover i still thought i would buy it, if nothing else just to complete the set.

As i recall interest seemed low with not that many watchers and no real bidding was going on until the end. But oh my, when things started to happen there was a small explosion and it ended up selling for $444(!). I couldn’t believe my eyes and felt like the biggest moron on the planet who had just given away what was now apparently a pretty damn desirable album! Call it what you want but in my opinion words like crazy, ludicrous, ridiculous or insane comes to mind…

As i’ve said before i really don’t want to take any kind of credit for things when it comes to all this. Frank Edwards had posted about his copy long before i did and Richard Forrest also mentions the yellow variant on his list on Rateyourmusic. However there has been quite a few hits on the post i did about it so i don’t know… maybe i helped raise awareness a little bit. And if so that was pretty stupid in the end since i would never ever cough up close to $500 for this record. But it’s safe to say that in one way or another fellow collectors are now aware of this alternative cover. It’s even gotten to the point where sellers on discogs mention that it’s a “red version” in the description as you can see below. I guess they are fed up with what they feel are crazy and irrelevant questions about what color the stupid shading on the logo is. And i don’t blame them, but it’s pretty funny. It was also pretty funny to see what happened right after this copy was sold as a lot of sellers thought what they held in their hands was pure gold and you could see red versions listed for hundreds of dollars for a while…

Time to cut to the chase…. as is common practice i was checking my saved searches this morning and among many blue dots there was one next to the one for “mtv high priority lp”. Certainly not the first time this has happened and naturally it didn’t get me all super excited but once i saw what was there my fingers started fiddling all over the phone and i couldn’t click things fast enough… I think it’s a least a bit remarkable that this is now the second one of these i have gotten for a BIN of just $10. However, in all my haste i didn’t pay attention to the shipping cost which was three times the cost of the record, but oh well… you can’t win them all. I don’t know if i should be happy though, and i definitely don’t feel like i just won some kind of lottery. This is still a train wreck of an album cover to me. But at least i didn’t have to pay hundreds of dollar for a piece of crap. And i am a little bit surprised it was still there for the taking, i would assume i am not the only one who has kept an eye out for it. But i ain’t complaining.

Maybe someday someone will come along who will want to trade this “gem” for a nice book, who knows…